I Hope We Hang on Past the Last Exit
by tia8206
Summary: There are two things that bother him when he looks at Rachel: how her eyes are nothing like Juliet's, but her mouth is just the same. Post-S6. Spoilers for "The End."


**Disclaimer: I don't own LOST. Shocker, I know.**

* * *

_I hope it stays dark forever _  
_I hope the worst isn't over _  
_And I hope you blink before I do._

- No Children, The Mountain Goats

* * *

It's a year before he even looks her up, but when James finally types_ Rachel Carlson_ into the White Pages web site, her name pops up, right there, so simple. He wonders whether he should call or just show up, but he figures if someone were telling him his sister was dead, he'd at least want them to have the decency to shell out for a plane ticket.

He parks outside like he's a damn stalker, and looks at the oil stain on the empty driveway and finally gets out and knocks but of course there's no one home. This is stupid. He should have called first.

Finally he leaves and drives the looping overhead highways of Miami until rush hour settles in and traffic jams up, and he turns off the air conditioner and opens the windows and tries to remember whether the sunset over Miami looks anything like the sunset over the island, and he can't decide.

He drives down Rachel's street again and there's an ancient, dark-blue Volvo in the driveway and he realizes Rachel is still driving Juliet's car. His chest contracts and he finds a hotel room for the night and he flies out the next morning. He dreams about falling and when he wakes up he's startled (because he's on a plane, and planes don't mean good things for him, usually).

* * *

It's stupid, missing Miles the way he does, but Miles is shacked up with Guyliner these days and they never seem to come up for air. It's incredibly fucking weird to James but Juliet would never have batted an eye.

Except it's just... James doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing; he'd go fishing with Jin if he could but it's just another thing that's been sucked away from him in a long list of things that have been sucked away from him. Maybe he should try to contact the Paiks? He has no fucking clue.

Finally he calls Cassidy. She lets him visit. He can't look her in the eye, so he focuses on the girl.

* * *

For some reason after that visit he finds himself thinking about the night early on in Dharmville when Juliet had confessed about the abortion she'd had back when she'd been a sophomore in college. How she'd regretted it almost immediately. That kid would have been about 13 the year he'd met her, in 2004. He couldn't imagine her with a 13-year-old. Or, hell, it's 2008 now. Some gawky 17-year-old with those same bright blue eyes.

Maybe she would have just been a simple Ob-Gyn if she'd had a kid, not gone through all those extra years of academic research. Not married that bastard of an ex-husband. Not gone to the island.

He'd understood when she'd told him she didn't want to have a baby in Dharmaville.

* * *

Every couple months, he visits Clementine.

He's starting to get used to waking up on planes.

* * *

After another year of whatever life James is supposed to be living now, he tries Miami again. He goes to Rachel's house on a Saturday this time. (That same car's there. He tries not to look at it as he walks up the driveway.) There's a boy's bike lying on its side in the front yard.

He rings the doorbell and his hand doesn't even feel like it's attached to his body. No one answers; he tries again. Finally he walks around to the backyard; a brunette is reading in the shade of a tree. She looks up at him, tilts her head. Her eyes narrow suspiciously. The mannerisms are the same and he wants to turn around right fucking now.

"Can I help you?" she asks.

"Sorry, no one answered the door," he says lamely. "I... Are you Rachel Carlson?"

"Yeah...?" She sticks a finger in her book, holding her place, and Jesus fucking Christ, she's reading Carrie and he wants to just get the fuck out of here right fucking now.

She cries and cries when he tells her, and he wishes to God he had never done this. But she gives him photos before he leaves. When he wakes up, startled and disoriented on the plane, he slides the packet of pictures out of his bag.

Doesn't open the envelope, but feels better just holding it.

* * *

He goes to visit Kate, in prison for parole violation. Six years, medium security. (Juliet had known something about six years trapped, he thinks.)

Kate looks pale and even her freckles are washed-out. Claire's living in Australia, Kate says. She's offered bring Aaron for a visit. Kate doesn't want the boy to see her in here, like this. Claire's pulling herself together. James understands.

* * *

James dreams that Juliet is moving over him, all warm skin and gasping moans and knees digging into his rib cage. She stills for a moment, leans down over him, nips at his neck, sucks at his earlobe.

"Don't wake up," she whispers into his ear, so of course he does.

"Dammit," he mutters into the darkness.

* * *

A month before Juliet would have turned 40, Rachel calls him. Tells him maybe he'll think it's stupid, but she bought a stone in a nature preserve, a little patch of green. Not a grave since he already dug that himself.

Rachel asks him about that stone. What name he thinks Juliet would have wanted on it, Carlson or Burke. _LaFleur_, he thinks. "Carlson would be good," he says. "It's what she ended up using back there." In his mind's eye, he sees her Dharma induction forms on the clipboard. She'd rolled her eyes when she handed it over to Horace.

"OK," Rachel says. "You want to come for a visit? Julian and I are going to go over there on, you know. On her birthday."

He books a flight. Stays in Rachel's guest room. The boy is bigger than last time he'd seen him.

He's not really sure what, if anything, he's supposed to bring to this little fake-grave brouhaha. He goes out by himself in the morning, shows up at the nature preserve with a bottle of water and a packet of seeds for wild yellow daisies. Rachel reads some too-long poem about stillness and he tries not to pay too much attention to it.

Afterward the three of them push down the seeds with their index fingers. James twists the cap off the water bottle. Julian waters the seeds.

* * *

Richard Alpert ages too quickly and dies too soon (if that's even possible - what a fucking contradiction), and James takes a week off work and goes to stay with Miles. The dude is a wreck, too much gray in his own hair, his eyes fatigue-ringed. They sit out on the beach and Miles is too jumpy. "Tell me it was worth it, man," Miles finally says. "Tell me there was a day when you just, like, moved on."

"I'll be sure to let ya know if that ever happens," James answers.

When he wakes up on the flight back, he snaps awake from some dream where he and Miles were partners in the LAPD.

* * *

There are two things that bother him when he looks at Rachel: how her eyes are nothing like Juliet's, but her mouth is just the same.

It happens just the once, when he's visiting for the fifth or sixth time, this kiss that comes out of nowhere because it's the heat and the wine and Julian's upstairs and James can't stop staring at her mouth. Suddenly they're up against each other, all tongues and teeth and desperation and her hands are in his hair but they push each other away at the exact same moment.

"You need to get over her," Rachel says to the wall.

"Yeah, well, I ain't the one drivin' around a twenty-year-old car," he mutters.

"Maybe you should leave," Rachel says.

He calls a cab and packs his bag. Rachel putters around the kitchen, washing wine glasses. Their eyes don't quite meet when they say goodbye.

* * *

He meets Siobhan the year after. In a bookstore, of course. They go out for coffee; afterward he can't remember who asked whom. She likes Stephen King, but she's a redhead. All this long smooth pale red hair, and too-sharp blue eyes. She sort of reminds him of Charlotte at first, before he gets to know her better.

After a year, they find a place together on the dead end of an overgrown street. The pavement is cracked everywhere and it makes him remember what those little yellow Dharma houses looked like after years of neglect. There are no loose floorboards in this house.

One evening he comes home to Siobhan planting yellow flowers along their driveway and he feels like he can't breathe.

"I love you," she whispers against his neck that night.

He keeps wondering why it can't just be enough, and watches the digital numbers on the bedside clock tick past 4 a.m.

Two months later he finds his own place. The sound of her crying almost does him in at the last minute, but it's not fair to her, anyway, so he just shifts the boxes in his arms and keeps making trips out to his car.

* * *

Kate gets out of prison and she comes to see him. They don't touch at all, even when they say hello. They drink too many beers and she passes out on his ugly-ass couch and he covers her up with a blanket and goes into his bedroom alone like he's supposed to. She looks like hell in the morning, but he keeps wondering why she acts so embarrassed about it, anyway.

They go out to a greasy-spoon diner for breakfast, and there's a mother at the next table with two little boys, and Kate turns her head away sharply, staring intently at her menu.

Out in the parking lot he realizes they took separate cars for a reason. They don't touch, even when they say goodbye.

* * *

Cassidy's still a massive bitch, but he figures he deserves it. She never kept him from seeing his daughter.

He didn't sit with Cassidy at Clementine's high school graduation, or her college graduation. Cassidy walked their daughter down the aisle at her wedding, but James was there in the front row and he danced with his daughter at the reception in a tent lit up with white lanterns and it was all more than enough, really, somehow.

Clementine's two little boys climb all over him when he visits them in Maine these days, and sometimes he snaps awake on those plane trips disoriented at how it's all seeming to work out some way or another.

* * *

Rachel comes to see him once or twice a year. He's not really sure what it is, they don't kiss again and they certainly don't sleep together... except they _sleep_ together. The first time it happens they drank a little too much and in the middle of the night he wakes up and they're both on top of his bed, fully clothed. He breathes in the scent of her hair and it's not Juliet but it's familiar to him by now all the same.

On what would have been Juliet's 60th birthday, they meet in that nature preserve again. Julian's moved away from Miami and it's just the two of them. The yellow daisies kept dying, Rachel said. She'd replanted them a few times before she gave up, years and years ago.

"Would it be weird if..." Rachel hesitates.

He fiddles with the bark of what they've come to think of as Juliet's tree. "What?"

Rachel smiles sheepishly. "I sort of like to think that Juliet was taking the flowers."

They drive to a garden center, buy more seeds, fertilizer, a bottle of water. They push down the seeds with their index fingers. They water the seeds together. Rachel calls him a few weeks later. "They're coming up all right," she tells him.

* * *

It creeps up on him slowly until he realizes he's more than half gray, three-quarters really, and he cuts his hair short and wonders if he would still be calling her Blondie.

* * *

Somewhere he thinks he hears a woman crying (but when he wakes up he's on a plane).


End file.
